How Formerly Wasteful Bob Got the New Nickname, “Mr. Bobvious”, and won an award for IT spending

You’ve no doubt been breathlessly following the exploits of Formerly Wasteful Bob, the IT Ops director who started using ParkMyCloud to automatically turn off his idle AWS instances so he didn’t have to pay for them 24×7.

Uh oh… what does Barb want?

A few weeks ago, Bob got a Slack message from Barb, his company’s Controller who tracks and balances all of the firm’s payments and receivables. Bob knew from experience there were only a handful of reasons a Controller would summon an IT guy – none of them good. Controllers only want to see you if something’s wrong…right?

But as far as Bob knew, he was on budget—and there had been no recent data breaches, so he felt prepared – or at least not insecure – as he jogged down one flight of stairs to Barb’s office.

“Well, you’re cruising along this year at $18,000 to $21,000 per month,” said Barb, “and all the sudden the bottom drops out and you’re down to around $15,000 per month. This ain’t my first budget rodeo. I see a suspicious change and I’m on it like sponsor decals on a racecar. Where is that money? You got three seconds to confess.”

Barb rose to her feet, counting to three, and as Bob’s mouth hung open in disbelief, she proffered a pair of plastic zip tie wrist restraints like the ones he saw police use on protesters at an Occupy Wall Street demonstration. “Citizen’s arrest. Turn around.”

“I just got out of the senior staff meeting,” replied Matthew, “where we decided to honor you with the quarterly Parsimonious Penny Pincher Award or PiPPA. As you probably know, we bestow the PiPPA on the person who has best exemplified frugal but not shortsighted budget stewardship.”

Matthew continued, reading from his notes. “Bob’s use of a new technology, Pork in the Cloud, which automatically turns off Amazon Web Services that we don’t need, is resulting in a significant reduction in our IT spending.”

Barb cracked, “What kind of name is Pork in the Cloud? It sounds like an online food delivery service for bacon addicts.”

“Wait,” said Matthew, squinting at his notes. “That’s not right. No, it’s ParkMyCloud. That’s the one.” He turned back to Bob. “It says here that ParkMyCloud costs just $99 a month. That can’t be right, can it?”

Bob took a breath and fully embraced the moment. “That’s right. Just $99 a month and we’ll reduce our AWS spending by about $36,000 in 12 months. ParkMyCloud was just such a bobvious solution. I mean – ”

The word ‘bobvious’ hung in the air. But only for a moment.

“I mean obvious,” Bob added.

Bobvious! That’s it!

“OMG,” yelled Barb. “Bob just said ‘bobvious.’ Wait ‘til I tell bookkeeping and HR.” Barb punched a few numbers on her phone activating the intercom in the hall outside her office. “Bob the IT guy just said ‘bobvious!’ That’s his new nickname. Mr. Bobvious!” Barb looked as though she absolutely lived for moments such as these.

As Bob walked past the bookkeeping bullpen towards the stairwell, he could feel the eyes on him and hear the slow chant… “Mr. Bobvious…Mr. Bobvious…Mr. Bobvious…”

As Bob sat down in his office, he thought to himself. “Mr. Bobvious. There are worse nicknames.”

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About Jay Chapel

Jay Chapel is the CEO and co-founder of ParkMyCloud. After spending several years in the cloud management space, Jay saw that there was no simple solution to the problem of wasted cloud spend - which led him to start ParkMyCloud in 2015. Before that, he spent 10+ years with Micromuse and IBM Tivoli, a provider of business infrastructure management software. After an acquisition by IBM, he led the successful sales integration and subsequent growth of the IBM Tivoli/Netcool business in Europe. He also held several regional and worldwide sales roles in Switzerland, the UK and the US. Jay earned both a BA in Finance and an MBA from West Virginia. Those few hours a month that Jay’s not busy with ParkMyCloud’s growth and success, you can find him on the ski slopes, on the soccer field, or on the golf course often accompanied by his three kids.
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